Tyron Woodley Silences All Critics And Retains His UFC Welterweight Championship With A Second Round D'arce Choke

Tonight, in his fourth title defense – his third in which his opponent was favored – UFC Welterweight Champion Tyron Woodley successfully retained the gold around his waist by dropping undefeated challenger Darren “The Gorilla” Till early in the second round, mauling him with ground-and-pound, and finishing with a beautiful d’arce choke. That final detail – the fact that Tyron Woodley choked the life out of Darren Till in the octagon tonight – also earned him his Brazilian jiu jitsu blackbelt, awarded to him by his corner and BJJ coach after the fight.

BJJ’s belt system isn’t linear at all, if you didn’t know how it works. It’s basically all up to your coach’s discretion on when promotions should come, and for many the journey to becoming a blackbelt takes well over a decade, so this moment was actually really cool.

As for the fight, though, I gotta say…it went pretty much how I thought it would! I like Darren Till as a personality and a fighter, I think he’s great just like the rest of you, but I don’t think he defeated Steven “Wonderboy” Thompson back in May, and I never thought he had what it took to defeat Woodley tonight. A puncher’s chance, sure, but after Tyron Woodley’s prior performances against Wonderboy (x2), Demian Maia, Robbie Lawler, Kelvin Gastelum, and many, many, more, I’ve learned one very important thing about Woodley: he fights to win. It sounds dumb, and obvious, like “No shit Bob, everybody fights to win.” but I truly believe few fight to win as much as Tyron Woodley. He’s willing to sacrifice being well-perceived by fans if it means playing it safe against fighters like Thompson or Maia, because he just wants to win. He doesn’t seem to make any mistakes, and he never strays from gameplan. Tonight, he displayed a bit of his strategy against Till in the first round, tying him up against the cage and whatnot, and then unfortunately our glimpse at Tyron’s answer to the question that is Darren Till was interrupted by a brutal right hand.

After that, it was all ground-and-pound before the d’arce was sunk-in and Till had no choice but to tap after fighting for life for quite a while.

In Woodley’s post-fight interview with Joe Rogan, he was thrown a complete softball to call out former UFC Interim Welterweight Champion Colby Covington for what would undoubtably be the most anticipated fight of Tyron’s career – and one where he’d be the babyface for once – but he chose not to answer that question and plug his upcoming rap single which apparently features Wiz Khalifa.

I tweeted about this, about how I was sorta slightly coming around on Woodley before he really just plugged this single like an absolute asshole, and the Tyronhive attacked me hardcore to the point where I just gave up and muted the conversation. I’ve noticed there’s a few fighters on the UFC’s roster, Tyron Woodley (and actually Colby Covington) included, that absolutely wreck your mentions if you ever say anything even slightly bad about them. People just vanity searching these names and waiting to pounce. It’s very strange. Look at the ratios here:

Weird!

Anyway, fantastic performance from UFC Welterweight Champion Tyron Woodley tonight, and fantastic pay-per-view overall. Probably the best of the Summer, all things considered! 226 was fantastic but if you’re scoring these cards, surely Francis Ngannou vs Derrick Lewis is a rough outlier in that 228’s favor. Tonight’s worst fight was Rivera/Dodson, and that wasn’t bad at all! It was pretty good!

Darren Till will be back, and better than ever, surely (as cliché as that sounds, he’s only twenty-five years old and carries a Fight-IQ well beyond his years), but I do hope it’s at Middleweight. It’d shake things up a bit, and yeah, I know he proved that he can make Welterweight this week and even cut an extra pound to prove his point, but god damn he looked rough doing it. Plus, that video of him cutting prior to the Wonderboy fight earlier this year was just excruciating to watch. The journey to 170 isn’t an easy one for Till. So please, move up to 185 and see what your power is made of there, Darren Till.

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Enjoy the rest of your night, ladies and gents. Don’t drink and drive. That’d be stupid.